Re: [pacman-dev] Time for changes

2006/10/5, VMiklos :

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 10:22:34AM -0700, Judd Vinet wrote: okay, so you would like to have the same header for each file and your copyright from 2002 to 2006. what about the follwong:

/* foo.c - This file is part of Pacman, see the COPYRIGHT file for more * information */

then all the names could be listed there

I don't think this will be better than one copyright holder. But anyway I don't have the right nor power to impose my mind.

...

But if the day comes where a big decisions needs to be made that only the copyright holder can make, I wouldn't want to be bogged down by a game of who-wrote-what -- I think that could tear the project apart.

if there are several authors, then the license can be changed to an other one in case all the copyright holders agree about the change, which is almost impossible. currently (yes, of course i really hope this will never happen :) ) if you go crazy and change the license, then you can do it, so the license of my own code is not guarantated. i hope you can see the problem

I don't see the problem. You can always take latest GPL version and make a fork. Or you just don't want that somebody can use your code under different license, not approved by you?

...

Again, I think the lack of Linus' name on some files is due to the crazy modularity of the kernel.

hopefully we will have backends other than 'files' and then we'll have crazy modules, too :)

Modules with different copyright holder are not a problem because they are not vital part of Pacman. One module can be replaced by another or just rewritten from scratch. I don't think that there will be many modules ever, or they will be too complex to rewrite if needed.

so, i don't plan to revert the copyright updates in our tree, but in case something is changed in the cvs (somehow we're listed as copyright holders) then of course i'll pull that change and drop our copyright fixes. and again, this whole "copyright thingy" from my part is about to be able to control under what license is my code distributed, not about hurting you in any way

Wouldn't it be strange that there will exist two very similar _branches_ of one software but with different copyright notices? ;-) I don't remember such case in OSS history yet. :-D -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)